The politician wants men to know how to die courageously;
the poet wants men to live courageously.
—Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, Nobel lecture, 1959

  

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the relationship between politics and poetic protest has taken on fresh urgency for American readers and writers. “I suspect the writers know in their hearts how ineffectual poetry is in greater American society,” W. S. Di Piero wrote in Poetry magazine in October 2003. He was commenting on the Poets Against the War movement and updating Dana Gioia’s plaint made in the controversial 1991 essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” In it, Gioia asserts that it is a “difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics,” given that poets lack a role in the broader culture and therefore do not have the confidence to create public speech.

Why is it that in this country poetry is viewed as separate from the business of the nation? Certainly this is an Anglophone peculiarity. In Latin America, José Martí, one of the region’s most beloved poets, led the movement to liberate Cuba from colonial domination. The Nicaraguan poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal was engaged in the Sandinista revolution and later served as his country’s Minister of Culture. The Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a diplomat, and a senator, and joined the ranks of Spanish poets such as Federico García Lorca and Miguel de Unamuno, who spoke out against General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Both Lorca and Unamuno lost their lives as a consequence of their Republican sympathies.

In France, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Robert Desnos wrote dissenting poetry while fighting for the Résistance. In Italy, Quasimodo and Cesare Pavese were repressed for denouncing the regime under which they lived, as were Russian and Polish poets such as Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, and Czeslaw Milosz.

Contemporary Middle Eastern poets such as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nizar al-Qabbani, Adonis, Ghazi al-Gosaibi, and Mahmoud Darwish have embraced the idea of committed literature, or a literature engagée, as Sartre termed it.

And yet, in the Anglophone West, poets ranging from W. H. Auden to W. B. Yeats are invoked for their epithets that warn against involving politics in poetry. Both poets were cited repeatedly in the wake of the White House poetry debacle of February 2003, when Laura Bush canceled her symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” after she learned that some of the poets on her guest list refused to attend in protest against the impending war. Sam Hamill, poet and founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, intended to present her with a petition and a compilation of protest poetry. Laura Bush’s spokeswoman said that it would be “inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” The conflict helped spark Hamill’s creation of the Poets Against the War movement.

Media accounts of the movement often quote Auden’s line “Poetry makes nothing happen,” or three lines from Yeats: “I think it better that in times like these / A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right.” It is not accurate to invoke these poets or their words as emblems of the apolitical poetry camp without recognizing that each in his own way led a profoundly political existence. Yeats aided the national cause in the uprising against British colonial power and later served as Senator for the newly freed Republic of Ireland. He rejected the aestheticism of “art for art’s sake,” declaring, “Literature must be the expression of conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion, and not an end in itself.”

And in fact, Auden’s poem—an elegy for Yeats—concludes by exhorting the poet to “follow right”:

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Auden, who traveled to Spain to support the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, argued in 1939 that “In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.”

Acting on their beliefs often led Auden and Yeats to the dynamic center of public life. Each remained wary of the traps of dogma and expressed that caution in his work, particularly later in life. But a political belief mixed with ambivalence and pessimism is nonetheless a political belief. The fact that it is tempered with an awareness of human failings, foibles, and hypocrisies is the mark of a responsible conscience—and when they appear in poetry, such complexities are the signature of great art.

Why is it that poets today are not considered by the nation as legitimate actors in the public sphere? What transpired in the Anglophone literary imagination since Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed nearly two hundred years ago that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”?

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